


Act Eight: Eight Possibilities for the End After the End

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 10:57:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6981496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fic which, given the name, is surprisingly not about Vriska.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Act Eight: Eight Possibilities for the End After the End

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Icey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icey/gifts).



I

All around them, the world is ending. More than the world— the story.

The cracks in the universe are brilliant now, blinding. Almost as bright as their own skin and neon claws. The dust is rising. The cracks in the rock would trouble them if they still had to stand with their feet on the ground.

Everything tilts towards two places. The dark mass of the black hole. The whiteness of the glowing juju.

Dead trolls and kids are screaming and falling everywhere. Vriska’s smiling, laughing, and Tavros is crying. Two Karkats stumble and disappear into a widening crack in the ground. A Nepeta, jacket torn, falls into a crack in the air. (They feel it with her, the hiss of depressurization, the oxygenated fry of the gap in reality, the breath leaving her lungs and her lungs leaving her body. This ultimate-selves gig is a bit of a drag.) Aradia flits up and away above them. The house juju pulses with white light. Lord English gapes his jaw.

Everything keeps tilting, slowly but irretrievably. The black hole is so massy now that up and down have been reassigned. Everything is falling apart, and everyone is falling towards the dark pit, the confluence of matter— Vriska falls, Tavros, Aradia in the broken sky. Davepeta, too, their wings beating frantically. Everybody but the Lord of Death, green and muscle-bound, who’s falling up, up, towards the roaring brightness of the house. He grabs onto an edge of the red stone that was once the ground, and hangs there, his exposed jawbone gritted, his ridiculous coat flapping. He strikes a strangely foolish figure, desperate and upside-down.

Davepeta’s falling, yes, but they beat their wings hard.

Lord English’s eyes would narrow, if they could narrow, as Davepeta labors into his view. Acid green and orange light plays across the skull-like face, the gold of his tooth, his eight-ball eyes. Davepeta is panting and gasping, but with a flash of sprite-light, there’s a sword embedded in their chest.

Lord English laughs as they draw it, one-handed, from their rib-cage. His laugh is horrible and glowing and capitalized.

“YOU THERE, FOOL,” he says. “THAT ISN’T THE SWORD I FEAR.” Davepeta kind of wishes he’d have gone with _no man can kill me_ but they’ll just have to save the Lord of the Rings references for later, when they’re all dead. Lord English looks at them and their sword, glowing orange but just as much a hunk of junk as when it fell out of Dave’s fridge three years ago. “IT’S JUST A CHEAP PIECE OF SHIT,” he says, and Davepeta can hear it now, the childish Caliborn whine in his booming voice.

“Yeah,” Davepeta says, “but it was never about the sword.” And they smile with Dave’s bitter smile, and they strike, the sword biting down into fingers of the cherub’s broad green hands, and it breaks, oh it breaks, but Lord English is falling—

 

No. That’s not how it happens.

 

 

II

They’re killed off-panel, off-camera. Before Vriska can unleash her treasure, they are scooped up and vaporized in a colorful beam. They aren’t anything special. They don’t get saved by the plot. Their absence isn’t noticed until it’s too late and everyone who loves them is dead or in another world.

In the moment between when they know they’re going to die and when they disappear, they spare a thought for Jasprose. Is she real enough to get a resolution to her story? And ARquius? They spend their last second hoping.

And then they die, die for the second time each, die without fuss or ceremony, and then they’re gone, and the story churns on, and you’d think with all this afterlife there’d be a little left for someone brave, and no, _that’s not how it happens either—_

 

 

III

They’d forgotten that they were just a game construct, before everything.

When the green sun blinks out, they blink out too.

Or—

 

 

IV

When the green sun blinks out, they have half a second, and that’s all it takes.

The Nepeta who was prototyped never got a chance to learn her aspect’s powers. But when her dead hands touched the kernelsprite she multiplied, inside herself.

There were Nepetas who died by swords or by explosions or by imps or sugar avalanches or (god, what happened, what happened) a broken piece of bow, there were Nepetas in love who died, there were Nepetas who fell out of love, and back in, and died, there were Nepetas who fought for others and died bleeding, there were Nepetas in pink and purple, who died heroic, or just. And she is all of them.

And every Dave who died did so, of course, a step-backwards in time.

Fraymotifs are pretty easy, it turns out, when you have the same brain.

The Nepeta who was prototyped never purchased the fraymotif _Da Capo Digitalis_ , but one of her must have. As for Dave, there were so many of him with boondollars burning holes in their pockets.

A flash of intricate circles, pink and red, overlayed.

 

Nepeta wakes up in her cave. The walls are still painted with black and red. The ceiling’s un-caved-in. Pounce de Leon crouches in a corner, sleeping.

 _It worked,_ she thinks. _It worked._

She hooks her gangly elbows over the edge of her recuperacoon and squints towards the cave’s entrance. Outside, it looks like the sun is just setting. It’ll be time to get up soon, to go out and hunt, to message Equius on Trollian and tease him, playful and pale, to somehow forget everything she knows is going to happen.

Next to her, a blond head breaks the surface of the sopor.

“Fuck!” Dave yells, splashing, accidentally getting green slime into his mouth and eyes. “What the fuck is this?!”

On the earthy ground of the cave there’s a dead crow and shitty sword.

“Oh no,” Nepeta says. “Oh no, why are you—

 

 

V

The green sun blinks out.

In their last seconds, the pink and red circles.

 _Da Capo Digitalis_ looks like gears and pulsing light.

“Dave,” a voice hisses, and Dave wakes up in his bed, in his apartment, to see a gray girl with a cleft lip crouching over him, yellow-eyed and panicking.

“Shit,” he says as he remembers.

 

They learn to live there, in the human past, together. Things change, of course. They leave the city. They live in a forest somewhere, maybe, venturing into civilization only for the occasional CD purchase or to Pester a girl they can’t disclose is their sort-of sister.

Maybe the world doesn’t end.

Maybe they get by.

Maybe—

 

 

VI

Green. Pink. Red. _Da Capo Digitalis._

They each wake up at home.

They think they’ve won.

They’re both alone.

Eventually, the game, the servers, the clients, the meteors—

 

 

VII

They aren’t scooped up by the black hole, they don’t evaporate into ash. They don’t disappear with the green sun, or disappear into the past despite it, no fraymotif, no circles or gears. John touches the doorknob with a crackle of electricity, and they find themselves in a new place.

No sprites allowed here, so they aren’t a sprite. Red-eyed, black-haired, brown-skinned, horned, they find their compromises of anatomy.

They still have wings, but physics has fucked them, and they can’t quite fly. Maybe a good glide now and then. They have a good sense of time, but they can’t skip through it. They have a good and kind soul, but can’t quite do what they want with it. They’re still a good fighter. They don’t fight.

Can Town has grown up into a world, and the survivors of the old world live in its strange cylindrical houses. Davepeta shares with Terezi and ARquius and a petulant Vriska, universe-saver, game-winner, only a little bit lucky. They have a garden out back and ARquius builds a few robots to tend it. Sometimes, Davepeta goes out hunting, and comes back in the afternoon with a panther or a couple wild cluckbeasts.

Sometimes, they wish they still glowed in the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIII

Edit: one more thing. If you're curious about whether there will be anything resembling an epilogue to this ending—


End file.
